Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion (4 page)

In 1974, Brown set up his automated recording equipment at the Haleakala Observatory on Maui for high-altitude observations (10,000 feet), and in 1975 he moved his laboratory to an underground vault at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.
Later, he also took measurements at the bottom of a 300-foot mine shaft in Berkeley, California.
His collection of measuring instruments now included a sidereal electrometer, a dielectric resistance sensor, a petrovoltaic self-potential detector, and a “K-wave” detector.
All the instruments registered variations that showed sidereal correlations.
In this way, he established that this sidereal phenomenon influenced electrogravitic coupling in a bidirectional fashion.
It affected both the
electrogravitic
conversion of electrostatic potential into gravitational force and the
gravito-electric
conversion of gravitational wave energy into electric power.

Brown’s K-wave detector could measure very small changes in a capacitor’s dielectric constant, thereby monitoring small changes in the local electric permittivity of space—the ability of space to store electric charge.
A capacitor’s electric permittivity—
ε
—is equal to its dielectric constant K times
ε
_o
, the electric permittivity of matter-free space, that is, ε = K
ε
_o
.
The K-wave detector registered changes believed to be caused by slight variations in
ε
_o
.
Brown felt that long-term changes in
ε
_o
could account for historical variations in the measured value of the speed of light.

The circuits Brown used for the K-wave detector and the dielectric resistance detector are shown in figure 1.12.
Another version of his K-wave detector used a spent nickel-cadmium battery cell in place of a high-K capacitor.
Figure 1.13 presents portions of a nine-day strip chart recording the voltage (in millivolts) spontaneously generated by a piece of Koolau basalt in August 1978.
²¹
The voltage varied cyclically with time of day and reached a maximum at times when the galactic center reached the zenith.
He also found that detectors separated by distances of up to eighty kilometers occasionally registered concurrent events, or “bursts,” indicating that they had been triggered by a common external source.
²²

1.7 • THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT

Another interesting episode in Brown’s career that should be mentioned, but for which documentation is very sparse and contradictory, concerns his work with the Navy on the Philadelphia Experiment.
This was a highly classified research project reportedly conducted in the Philadelphia Navy Yard in October 1943 whose alleged objective was to render a naval vessel invisible both to radar and to the naked eye.
The list of scientists said to have worked on the project includes Albert Einstein, Vannevar Bush, John von Neumann, and Nikola Tesla.
Before describing this further, it is worth reviewing what Brown was doing in the years leading up to the project.

Figure 1.12.
Bridge circuits that Brown used for his K-wave detector (a) and for
his dielectric resistance detector (b).
(Taken from entries in Thomas Townsend
Brown’s 1974 laboratory notebook)

Figure 1.13.
A portion of a nine-day strip chart recording of the voltage generated
by a piece of Koolau basalt.
Voltage maxima occur at times when the
Galactic center reached its zenith.
(Diagram courtesy of the Townsend Brown
Family and Qualight, L.L.C.)

Early in 1933, while working at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., Brown was given temporary leave to serve as a physicist on a geophysical expedition to the Caribbean sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute and financed by businessman Eldridge Johnson, cofounder of the Victor Talking Machine Company, which was the forerunner of RCA.
²³
The Johnson-Smithsonian Expedition, which was conducted on board Johnson’s immense yacht the
Caroline
, involved mapping the locations of underwater rifts.

However, there was much more to this expedition than just science.
While on this cruise, Brown had the opportunity to meet Johnson and several of his associates, who included his wealthy business partner Leon Douglass and the British master spy William S.
Stephenson, who, years later during World War II, earned the title “the man called Intrepid.”
In his Internet-published biography about Brown, Paul Schatzkin states that he learned from one of Brown’s former close acquaintances that Johnson and Douglass were members of Stephenson’s international intelligence network and that while on board the
Caroline
, Brown himself became recruited into its ranks.
²⁴
Schatzkin dubbed this network the Caroline Group and said that it was to play a significant role in the course of Brown’s life.
Much of Schatzkin’s inside information came from an individual he code-named Morgan, who at that time held a high-ranking position in one of the U.S.
intelligence agencies and in earlier years had worked closely with Brown.

In the years that followed, Brown held a number of jobs.
One particularly worth mentioning is his assignment in 1938 to serve as an assistant engineering officer on the maiden voyage of the USS
Nashville
.
On its return trip from Europe, this ship ferried across the Atlantic $50 million in gold bullion that was being transferred from the Bank of England to the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York.
While Brown was on that voyage, an electrogravitic research laboratory was established for him at the University of Pennsylvania.
Schatzkin wrote that Johnson was involved in the construction of this laboratory, whose operation was funded from part of the money that the
Nashville
was transferring.
²⁵

In 1939, Brown left the University of Pennsylvania to work as a material and process engineer with the Glenn Martin Company in Baltimore, an early forerunner of the Lockheed Martin aerospace corporation.
Shortly afterward, in 1940, the Navy called on him to head up a “mine sweeping research and development project” under the Bureau of Ships in Washington, D.C.
William Moore wrote that Brown directed a staff of fifteen Ph.D.’s and was allotted a research budget of nearly $50 million for the project.
²⁶
One might suspect that the funding money came from the very same stash that had been transferred to the Chase Manhattan two years earlier.
This was a significant sum of money, about 5 percent of the U.S.
Navy’s 1940 budget!
We are left to speculate whether the Caroline Group was somehow involved.
Whatever the case, this project must have been very important, and one wonders whether it was dealing with just “mine sweeping.”

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of America’s direct involvement in World War II, Brown was assigned to the Naval Operating Base in Norfolk, Virginia, as officer in charge of the Atlantic Fleet Radar Materiel School and Gyro-Compass School.
In the summer of 1942, he was assigned to return to Philadelphia to disassemble the scientific equipment kept at his laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania and ship it to Norfolk.
He continued his work there, at the Atlantic Fleet Radar School, until retiring from the Navy near the end of 1943.

From a brief entry Brown made in one of his autobiographies, we find that after his assignment to the Bureau of Ships in Washington, D.C., and before his assignment to the Atlantic Fleet Radar School, he was assigned to the Philadelphia Navy Yard as an assistant machinery superintendent for “outfitting new ships.”
In the autobiography, Brown wrote:

My activities during the war were largely as follows:

1. Acoustic and Magnetic Mine Sweeping (Officer-in-Charge) Bureau of Ships, Washington, D.C.
   
2. Assistant Machinery Superintendent (outfitting new ships) Philadelphia Navy Yard
   
3. Naval Research Laboratory–Radar Refresher
   
4. Atlantic Fleet Radar School (Commanding Officer) Naval Operating Base, Norfolk, VA.
   Advanced teaching and writing of textbooks, Officer and Librarian.
   ²⁷
   

Curiously, the navy yard assignment as well as his “radar refresher” assignment at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington are omitted in other biographies of Brown.
His autobiography does not give dates for these assignments.
However, his biography in
Who’s Who in American Science
lists him as finishing his work at the Bureau of Ships in 1941.
²⁸
Also, Moore’s article lists Brown as beginning his work at the radar school shortly after the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, hence in 1942.
²⁹
His assignment to the Philadelphia Navy Yard, then, would likely have been sometime during 1941.
This would have placed him in the very location where the USS
Eldridge
DE 173 destroyer escort is said to have been outfitted in preparation for the Philadelphia Experiment and where the invisibility experiment was alleged to have been conducted in October 1943.
Considering Brown’s technical caliber as a research scientist, without further information one is left to wonder whether the nautical machinery that he was in charge of outfitting at the Philadelphia Navy Yard might have been equipment for a research experiment to be conducted aboard a ship, lending credence to claims that he had worked on the Philadelphia Experiment.

Later in his life, Brown was privately asked by family friend and business associate Josh Reynolds about his involvement in the Philadelphia Experiment.
Brown answered that he “was not permitted to talk about that part of his work”; however, he did comment that “much of what has been written about the project is grossly exaggerated.”
³⁰
Here, he was probably referring to claims some have made that the ship had been made to travel through time or that it had teleported itself to Norfolk Harbor, where it was alleged to have reappeared for a few minutes before disappearing and reappearing once again in the Philadelphia Navy Yard.
Yet the fact that he did not flatly deny his involvement in the project leads one to suspect that the rumors of his involvement are true.

Moore, coauthor of the book
The Philadelphia Experiment
, once asked Brown to edit a rough draft of an article he was writing on Brown’s life.
Moore had planted a paragraph describing a series of experiments, sponsored by the Navy, that were based on the effects and equipment later associated with the Philadelphia Experiment.
He had done this intentionally to see Brown’s reaction.
Although Brown made other corrections and notes for changes to the manuscript, he allowed the entire test paragraph on the Philadelphia Experiment to remain intact.
Thus, we are left to conjecture that tales of the existence of this project may be true and that Brown had somehow been involved in this project, although what his involvement was is open to speculation.

In their book
The Philadelphia Experiment
, Moore and Charles Berlitz cite letters attributed to a former sailor, Carlos Allende (a.k.a.
Carl Allen), that suggest that the USS
Eldridge
was made invisible on October 28, 1943, when it enveloped itself in a very strong magnetic field.
³¹
They said a large amount of electric power from onboard generators was used to resonantly excite large degaussing coils that were wrapped around the inside of the ship’s steel hull.
The resonant excitation would have set up a pulsating magnetic field, turning the ship into a giant electromagnet.
This intense field was said to make the ship invisible both to radar and by sight!

According to Allende, the crew of the ship experienced physical and mental side effects so horrendous that the project was immediately terminated.
He alleged that most of the crew were found to be violently sick after the field had been shut off, some were missing, and some had gone crazy.
Most unusual, five men were found fused to the metal of the ship’s structure, some crew members being stuck in steel bulkheads, others within the ship’s deck, and another with the ship’s railing stuck through his body.
Allende also claimed that for a period of time, ranging from minutes to, in some cases, months, men would spontaneously become invisible and unable to move, speak, or interact with other people.
Such people were said to have become “caught in the Flow” or “stuck in a freeze.”
Depending on the duration of the mishap, recovered victims were said to be left with symptoms ranging from psychological trauma to insanity.
Allende maintained that those who lived were discharged from the Navy as “mentally unfit” for duty regardless of their condition.

Although it is difficult to sort out fact from fiction when trying to understand what had been done in the Philadelphia Experiment, laboratory research has shown that a metal object can be made radar invisible by high-intensity magnetic fields.
At the 1994 Tesla Symposium in Colorado Springs, K.
Corum, J.
Corum, and J.
Daum described an experiment in which they wound a high-amperage coil around a 2-inch-thick, 14-inch-diameter steel torus.
³²
They found that when the coil was electrified with a sudden surge of current of several thousand amps or more discharged from a large high-voltage capacitor, the high-gauss magnetic field produced around the torus caused a fivefold reduction in radar reflection from the steel core.
Some term this the Corum-Daum effect.
The production of optical invisibility, however, has yet to be reported by scientists working outside of the classified world.